Back to Roots: Re-imagining Everyday Environmental and Social Relations in BaToRo Ecovillage, Tenerife

Abstract

This thesis explores Ecovillages as heterotopias, or other-spaces, constructed by diverse cultural actors shared desires of re-imagining environmental and social relationships. Precisely, I examine how these spaces foster an intimate way of co-living and co-depending on nature and belonging social actors in ways that stimulate re-imagination of everyday relationships but also envisioning beyond internalized habitus. My research location was Batoro community on Tenerife island, and it consists of participant observation, a focus group and 16 semi-structured interviews. Ethnographic data overall revealed that Batoro fosters a symbiotic lifestyle whereby environmental, communal, and individual wellbeing are seen as intrinsically linked. This lifestyle is driven by a relational sustainable paradigm that is embodied through certain practices of permaculture, particularly those of reducing waste, using natural and renewable materials, composting, and polyculture spatial and social designs. Batoro members are immersed in an intimate lifestyle with nature and community in ways that stimulate actors’ reflexivity of normalized habitus back home and create opportunities for them to learn beyond these internalized structures through the confrontation of heterogeneous lifestyles. Consequently, these experiences provide actors with a greater sense of agency in the natural and social field as it increases their familiarity with nature, but also of co-existing and tolerating diverse ways of living, perceiving, and enacting in the world.